EJ

On a Thursday night in late November of last year, residents from Chelsea and East Boston came out in force for a meeting of Massachusetts’s Energy Facility Siting Board. At issue: a proposal by Eversource, the state’s largest utility company, to build and operate two new 115-kilovolt underground electric transmission lines and an above-ground substation…

Two days before Thanksgiving, Governor Patrick gave environmental justice advocates something to be truly thankful for – he issued an executive order on environmental justice. Executive Order 552 is one of only a handful of executive orders addressing environmental justice in the country. And while Governor Patrick’s action was historic, the real heroes are the grassroots advocates and…

I grew up in a small town in rural western Pennsylvania. My father was the first African American born in our town, and he was the first to graduate from high school. My parents managed to raise seven children on my father’s hourly-wage job as a sanitation worker on my town’s only garbage truck. For…

The most vulnerable and environmentally over-burdened communities across Massachusetts’ 351 cities and towns suffered a great loss last week. The Supreme Judicial Court had an opportunity to bring real teeth to the Commonwealth’s Environmental Justice Policy, a landmark policy that has a lot of heart and good intentions, but like most uncodified policies, lacks any…